Starfish wants to help children heal from trauma, improve learning

Pre-school Behavioral Health Therapist for the Livonia Birth to Five Starfish Family Services program, Lindsey Fanning, talks about her work and some of the benefits of the program.
Elaine Cromie/Detroit Free Press

The 29-year-old child behavioral therapist is not at a cocktail party, and most of her conversations are with people whose height puts them at her waist, just high enough to reach up for a hug.

Fanning is monitoring moods and watching interactions, between students and other students, between teachers and students, looking for signs that a meltdown or tears represents more than a typical 4-year-old reaction to a minor disappointment.

At one point, she praises a child's work, which distracts him from being mad at another child. In another instance, she chats with a teacher trying to determine whether the way she handled a different child was best.

She and the teachers — and the entire staff at Starfish Family Services — have been trained to watch for signs of trauma, signs that a child needs help before a child and family need even more help.

Fanning and her fellow therapists represent a new direction for Starfish Family Services, the 54-year-old, Inkster-based, social services agency. Starfish offers parenting resources, children's mental health services, Head Start programs and an emergency youth shelter. It helps more than 10,000 families a year.

After years of providing vital, traditional, reactive, crisis-oriented aid, Starfish expanded its mission 25 years ago from just responding to crisis to intervening to prevent crisis. It worked to get to families before emergencies. Then, 10 years ago, it expanded the amount of mental health service it provided to younger children, those who see what they shouldn't and are expected to learn in spite of.

Now it is growing again. It will announce Wednesday that it will train its entire corps of employees — from teachers and therapists, to administrators and lunch staff — on childhood trauma and expand its efforts to provide mental health care to all the children it serves — from infancy to age 5.

Following a trend that state officials are calling the needed wave of future care, Starfish will be the first agency in Michigan to adopt Trauma Smart, a comprehensive training program that allows teachers and therapists to help children heal from any number of traumatic experiences that could include being assaulted, seeing a family member killed, or being abused or neglected — all things that negatively affect children’s ability to learn or become emotionally strong. And it now operates the largest infant mental health program in the country.

No place needs trauma care more.

Michigan ranks near the dismal top among states with the highest percentage of children who have had two or more adverse childhood experiences, according to the National Survey of Children’s Health. More than 28% of our children have had two or more adverse experiences, compared with 22% nationally.

Dozens and dozens of agencies work with children across Wayne County. But what those in urban centers with high levels of violence are recognizing is that the children of trauma, those who live with violence, abuse or a lack of love, cannot be expected to learn as if their environments didn't matter. Living in a toxic place, where they might see someone killed or experience loss or injury themselves, is an obstacle to their being ready to learn.

In Wayne County, which includes numbers from Detroit, the news is worse: The Starfish announcement comes five months after an extensive Free Press report offering solutions for children's challenges detailed that more than 2 of every 5 children in Detroit were victims of violent crimes such as homicide, sexual assault, aggravated assault and robbery.

More than 70% of children seen by community mental health officials in Wayne County have experienced at least three potentially traumatic events that could change how they think and learn, Jim Henry, a professor of social work at Western Michigan University and director of the Children’s Trauma Assessment Center that assesses child trauma, told us then.

Most of those children are from Detroit, Henry said, adding that his screeners looked for symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or complex trauma, the condition that occurs when a child suffers multiple traumatic events.

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Ashley Clinton, an assistant teacher, embraces student Braylon Williams, 4, after an argument with another classmate, during pre-school on Thursday, April 27, 2017 at St. Rafka Maronite Catholic Church in Livonia. (Photo: Elaine Cromie, Detroit Free Press)

The center’s mission is to determine the impact of trauma, stress and abuse on a child’s neurodevelopment and how those things affect thinking and learning, he said.

“We know that there is chronic trauma, or complex trauma, where a child is constantly exposed to traumatic events, in their home or neighborhood; overwhelming events that create powerlessness and an ongoing sense of danger,” Henry said then. “Children’s brains literally are changed into a continually triggering fight, flight or freeze mode within the brain. So the stress-response system that we all have is on hyper alert.

“So kids are continually perceiving danger when danger might not be there because of their chronic exposure,” he said. “That impacts the emotional system of the brain and compromises their ability to access their thinking center of the brain. Your emotional system becomes overdeveloped because you’re in constant fight, flight or freeze, and your ability to think is compromised, which is very significant in terms of your ability to learn.”

It is a sentiment that the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services also embraces.

"MDHHS understands the significant impact that childhood trauma has on the physical and behavioral health of children and adults," Director Nick Lyon said in a statement. "We also know that with intervention and supports, people can overcome traumatic experiences. This is why MDHHS has prioritized trauma intervention across many of our programs. This includes trauma screening, assessment and treatment.

"Like Starfish, many of our partners in local communities across the state recognize the effect of trauma experiences on children and have implemented appropriate and innovative trauma-informed programs and interventions. We appreciate the work that Starfish and so many others are doing at the community level to reduce the negative impact of trauma on children and families."

Mission change has been ongoing for years at Starfish.

"Starfish made the transformational and risky decision 25 years ago to move more upstream and move away from crisis and the child welfare system to really investing in families and prevention," Kalass said. "Up until then, we were based a mile from (current headquarters) with a youth crisis center for adolescent boys and girls who needed short-term stays.

"That’s one of our legacy programs. And we still have crisis services," Kalass said. But the late Ouida Cash, founder and former CEO of Starfish, "decided that she wanted to teach families how to swim rather than drag their bodies out of the fast-moving river."

Starfish merged with mental health agencies and began the complex new work of reaching children where they were. It reinvented itself and began offering Head Start services across Wayne County. It also began working with entire families rather than just children.

"Children live in the context of families," she said. "So if we weren’t helping families — and parents — we weren’t helping children."

"Working at Ford, you know what Ford needed to be best at in terms of its brand," she said. "It was the F-series. It was the No. 1 volume vehicle in the world. Ford had to do other things because young college grads wanted Focuses for the good payment. Ford made a lot of things. But they knew what their core competency was. When I got here, we needed to figure out what our F-series was, what we needed to be best at."

They did. Now they are working on the Starfish Method, searching for the next F-series, and a way to reach children from infancy to ensure their minds are ready to succeed every year in school and in life.

It requires an extensive amount of training and a belief that the entire agency must buy into the new mission.

Adopting the Trauma Smart research intervention program, she said, meant "transforming an entire culture — from kitchen staff to CEOs, from site leaders to teachers — to really understand trauma and how to create healthy relationships between the adults who work at Starfish and parents and children."

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From left, pre-schoolers Addison Depew, 5, Lacey Gill, 5, and Jayla Johnson, 5, play on computers during school on Thursday, April 27, 2017 at St. Rafka Maronite Catholic Church in Livonia. (Photo: Elaine Cromie, Detroit Free Press)

"Now we invest in mentor-coaches for teachers. It’s not enough to give them 90 minutes of training; they need ongoing immersion and refreshers and training," she said. "It’s going to be a three- or four-year launch to get to a stable platform of service. In Western Wayne County, we’re seeing over 90% of our children leaving for kindergarten are ready for success, based on their emotional, educational and cognitive development. We know we’re on the right path, but we know there’s a lot of work to be done, especially in Detroit."

They knew they were on the right track when they began, screening 500 families in their first year (95% of all they served), and 58% had one or more instances of trauma.

What was more telling, she said, was that 22% of them had six or more instances.

When that is what stands between a teacher and a student's success, it seems folly to try to teach anyway.

That's what Fanning knows for sure as she works the room, stopping to answer teachers' questions while keeping an eagle eye on the dozens of interactions that take place in a classroom of 4-year-olds.

Sometimes, it means defusing a situation. Other times, it means reaching down and accepting arms that reach up for a hug.

"I'm just existing," she said. "Sometimes, I'm watching for things: If there are conflicts or kids need extra support. If I see something, we do coaching. Let's say there were two kids in conflict over a toy, I might be able to step in and intervene. If the teacher intervenes, I can observe and give feedback. We determine whether additional services are needed.

"We're so lucky to be able to form such great relationships with the kids," she said. "When they're tired, or hungry, or sad. If they just need extra loving, we're happy to give it."

Sometimes, before you teach a child, you must love a child — or teach others to love that child first. For children living with trauma, it is necessary. Then, they can learn.